Donate with PayPal

Our ancestors and we have inhabited the farm for so long we have contrived the comfortable illusion that orderly and civilized violence isn’t really violence at all. This idea of democratic self-determination is nothing more than an illusion. It is a Potemkin village that we have unwittingly built that mollifies our passions and so permits our owners, the state bureaucracies, to extract from us the fruits of our labor in order to parasitically advance themselves.

In reality this whole process has been nothing more than political parties jockeying for power. Their goal is not a noble quest to unburden their citizens from the oppressive yoke of a foreign regime. No, their goal is to be the ones with their hands on the reins of that yoke.

If a voter cannot be bothered to know the name of their candidate, then they truly have no business voting. Such voters are muddling the process with noise and diminishing the voice of those that did take the time to become educated. Imagine the outcome of a vote on the best baseball player if 70% of the people voting know absolutely nothing about baseball? How valid do you imagine those results would be?

New car dealerships across the country, and most recently in Georgia, are fighting to block the entrance of Tesla Motors into the new car marketplace because they refuse to play by the "good ol' boys" rules (made into laws) that stipulate all cars must be sold through independently owned dealerships. It's the same old crony-capitalist story: publicly proclaim it is about "consumer protection", privately acknowledge it's about protecting profits by limiting competition.

Yes, I am a big dumb idiot. I, like many others, fell prey to the bitcoin frenzy last fall as the price continued to climb, and climb and climb, and just when I thought it couldn't go any higher, it did. Although I had managed to purchase a small amount of bitcoin (0.16 BTC) at the Cryptocurrency conference in Atlanta (October 2013) for the now-unbelievable price of $120/BTC (using a bitcoin ATM they had there), I felt I had for the most part missed the boat on this whole bitcoin thing. But better late than never. I looked into mining...

The NCAA is told by its masters (US District Court) that it is not permitted to engage in voluntary arrangements. It has been ordered to permit direct payments to student athletes, proving once again that there is no aspect of our lives too trivial to escape the Panopitcon of the state and its forced egalitarianism.

Apparently we are supposed to be grateful for the "restored" freedom of unlocking our cellphones recently bestowed upon us by the very people that took it in the first place. The state is nothing if not confirmation of Harry Browne's aphorism "“[The State] is good at one thing: It knows how to break your legs, hand you a crutch, and say, "See, if it weren't for the [state], you wouldn't be able to walk."

Obamacare's poison pill provision has backfired. The bill's authors used plain language in order to permit the pill's targets no wiggle room, but now that same language is biting them in the posterior as they attempt to disown its original intent. Their poison pill has turned into a self-destruct hot-potato that like a long lost love-child, no one wants to take responsibility for.

Borders are a fiction. Borders are about power. A lack of borders is inimical to those who derive their power from democracy. The only principled position on borders and immigration is 100% open borders with no restrictions whatsoever. As long as one does not trespass on private property then no rights violation can occur.

An example of how the irresponsibility of a few drives the state to implement ever more impediments in our lives. The pursuit of happiness found at the center of the Tootsie Pop that is life requires ever more licks, but at some point we'll just have to bite down to circumvent the busybodies trying to protect us from ourselves.

There is no holiday more incongruous with its stated celebratory raison d’être than the 4th of July, otherwise known as Independence Day, but perhaps more appropriately Irony Day. It purports to celebrate the complementary combination of political and individual independence (aka freedom and liberty). That it takes place in a country that actively thwarts the former while ignoring, for utilitarian reasons mind you, the latter, is perhaps more sardonic than it is ironic. Consider for a moment what the representatives of the nascent United States did in July 1776: they made a declaration of secession. That is, they formally declared their...

This past week the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) issued a ruling in Riley v. California that dares to uphold the remains of a much abused 4th Amendment. The court ruled that the police may not search the cellphone of someone placed under arrest (often for offenses as trivial as “disobeying a lawful order” or “disorderly conduct”) without first having obtained a search warrant. In the digital age the principal of good design “form follows function” no longer is guaranteed. Digital function is not deducible from physical form; the sublime masks astounding capabilities. The contention was that since traditional...

The insurance industry is unique in that its product tends to incentivize the very behavior people seek to protect themselves from. This is called “moral hazard.” For example, all things being equal, someone with collision insurance will tend to drive more recklessly than someone with no coverage. Someone with flood insurance will deliberately build their home in a flood zone. In other words, people do things they would never otherwise do absent the assumption of protection. There are ways to tame moral hazard. Large first-dollar deductibles ensure that the insured will feel some pain with a loss – negative feedback...

So let me see if I have this straight. Even though there was zero evidence that Iraq was involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001 or that Al-Qaida had any operational presence in Iraq, the US invaded Iraq anyway. This resulted in nearly half a million dead Iraqi’s, close to a million Iraqi orphans and a death toll of US military personnel that more than doubled the carnage of September 11. The invasion was the light that brought on the moth-like focus of Al-Qaida to that region. Not content with that mess, the US unilaterally decided to depose Gadhafi, thereby creating a...

I really hate Paypal. It is astonishing that a company a mere 16 years old could so quickly devolve into a lumbering bureaucratic beast that is indistinguishable from a government agency. As the consumer/buyer I have no qualms with Paypal; sending money to people or companies is more or less a painless experience. However, when the roles are reversed and I’m the one receiving funds, well, they are less “pal” and more “foe.” Allow me to explain: My company, Seachem Laboratories, has used Paypal for many years to process credit card payments. Their fees are generally lower and their electronic...

The War on Drugs is perhaps the most unjust “war” ever waged. It is not, as in conventional warfare, a conflict between states, but rather a conflict of a parasite (the state) against its host (the people). Just as cancer grows by attacking its host, so too does state power expand as it attacks its citizens in the name of saving them. The tumor that is the drug war is but one variant of the cancer that is state power. It has been said that war is the health of the state (Randolph Bourne). If that is so, then traditional wars...

War is ugly. War is dirty. War is perhaps the single most horrifying event one could participate in. And yet despite all of that, there are those who have been compelled, for a variety of reasons (duty, honor, peer pressure, guilt, pragmatism, or in the case of the draft, direct threat) to suppress all natural human instinct and jump headfirst into that icy blackness of omnipresent death that is war. Those that survived we honor as veterans, those less fortunate we honor on Memorial Day. And how should we most appropriately honor the fallen? With parades? With solemn speeches? That...